Word: perseus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...lofty Great Hall of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art last week appeared a newly acquired, exquisitely graceful, 7-ft. white marble statue of the mythical Perseus victoriously displaying the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa. It was completed in 1808 by the neoclassical Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. In its first week atop its pedestal, it drew gasps of admiration from some. Others responded to its supersubtle softness and delicacy much as did the poet Keats when shown Canova's half-nude statue of Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister. Sniffed Keats: "Beautiful bad taste...
Canova, one of the most celebrated sculptors of his day, known as "the new Phidias," had carved an earlier Perseus for a Milanese nobleman at his atelier in Rome. It was inspired by the celebrated 1st century Roman marble of Apollo Belvedere, which had recently been carried off from the Vatican by invading French soldiers. Pope Pius VII liked the new Canova so much that the Roman authorities refused to grant an export permit, and it was bought for the Vatican where it now stands. (The Apollo was also returned.) A Polish countess, Valeria Tarnowska, then commissioned a second Perseus...
Soon the literary critics were in full cry. A New Statesman pundit called Dr. No "the nastiest book" he had ever read, full of "two-dimensional sex longings." Breathing even more heavily, a professor in the New Republic discovered mythic overtones and likened poor Bond to Perseus and St. George. Ian Fleming could find only contempt for anyone who tried to read anything into Bond. He quite frankly wrote for money, and did not like his hero very much, although, he admitted, "I admire his efficiency and his way with blondes...
...pictures and a few sculptures. His possessions, following his credo, are less esthetic choices than planks in a pedagogical platform. The bulk of the collection dates from before 1900. There are quaint, good things, such as Sir Edward Burne-Jones's eight pre-Raphaelite panels of the Perseus legend. There are great artists with bad works: a Degas copy of a Poussin, and a grotesquely tortured Orozco Slave...
Francis of Assisi (Perseus; 20th Century-Fox) is only a medium-sized religious picture; there are plenty of horses and a couple of cheetahs but no elephants. Still. Producer Plato Skouras took pains to please Papa Spyros. To tell the story of St. Francis, he took color cameras, cast and Director Michael Curtiz to Assisi...